How to Nearly DOUBLE Your Email Open Rate Overnight

by Matt McWilliams | Aug 4, 2016 | Business, Email Marketing

A while back, I nearly doubled the number of people who open my emails. Doing so required no new skills, almost no extra time, and was incredibly easy to implement. How’d I do it? Keep reading to find out.

NOTE: Mark Sieverkropp from my team wrote a related post on how to use mailing to unopens in affiliate campaigns. Click Here to read it now.

Email marketing is an affiliate’s number one tool. There is no doubting or disputing that.

The more people you have on your list, the better (as a general rule). The more people who open those emails, the better (always). And the more people who click the links, the more sales you will make.

So nearly doubling my open rates (and click rates) is a BIG FREAKING DEAL!

How I Increased My Open Rates by 76.7% Overnight

Two years ago, I began studying copywriting with Ray Edwards. That drastically increased my open rates and click rates.

When I implemented his strategies, my open rates climbed a little (about 25%) which was great. And my click rates almost doubled!

And while I highly recommend you learn the skill of copywriting, that is not the simple strategy to nearly double your open rates overnight. Learning copywriting takes time. This strategy works instantly!

The simple strategy I implemented was this: I mailed to my unopens.

Every single email was re-sent, some multiple times.

Yep, that was it. It takes less than two minutes to schedule a re-send and the number of people reading my emails went up 76.7%!

Below, I’ll share how I do this, but first, here’s a look at how rare this practice actually is, even among the top online marketers.

My Poll of 57 Online Marketers – Do You Mail to Your Unopens?

I recently conducted a poll of online marketers. These marketers ranged from part-time bloggers with less than 1,000 email subscribers to multi-million dollar businesses with 100,000+ people on their lists.

Here’s what I found about mailing to unopens:

Only 16% regularly mailed their unopens. This meant they did so on more than half of their emails.

22% did so on 25-50% of their emails.

7% did so on occasion (less than 25% of the time).

55% had never done so.

More shocking is that even if I looked at only the top marketers making more than $100,000 per year, the numbers were almost exactly the same. Of the 40 people who made more than $100,000 the year before:

20% regularly mailed unopens.

20% did so on 25-50% of their emails.

15% did so on occasion.

45% never did.

These findings were surprising until I thought about my own experience.

I’d been in online marketing for more than a decade and I fell into the 3rd category (barely). I only emailed my unopens approximately once out of every twenty emails (about 5% of the time).

In other words, I was leaving a lot of traffic and money on the table.

How to Mail Your Unopens the Right Way

The technical side of things is actually very easy. Whether you use MailChimp, AWeber, ConvertKit, InfusionSoft, or another program, most email marketing programs offer the option to send to a segment of your list based on whether they opened an email.

Here’s an example from MailChimp:

It takes only an extra ten seconds to select the segment you want to send to. In this case, I am sending the email to everyone who did not open the July 19th email.

FAQ About Mailing to Unopens

As I shared this with a group of fellow online marketers, three questions came up frequently. You might have these same questions now, so I’ll answer them below.

When should I send the second email?

We like to re-send the email 2-3 weeks after the original. This gives people time to open and reduces the chance that they get a duplicate email.

We work this into our content calendar so that no one gets a re-send on the same day as another email. For us, this means we usually send Tuesday emails on Fridays or Saturdays and Thursday emails on Sundays and Mondays.

Here’s what it looks like in our content calendar:

Should I do this on every email?

Yes, as long as the email is still timely.

It would make no sense to re-send your “Happy Thanksgiving” email, of course. But otherwise, we re-send every email that makes sense, whether it be a blog post or a promotional email.

What should I send?

We mix it up a bit depending on the subject matter.

Sometimes we send a “RE: Reply” email, where we simply put “RE:” in front of the original subject line. Or we “forward” the email by putting “FW:” in front of the original subject line. When you do this, make sure to include a note at the beginning of the email such as, “This post really resonated with people and I didn’t want you to miss it.”

You can also rewrite the subject line and the content of the email, depending on how it performed originally.

NOTE: Re-send emails are also a great time to test things. We tend to use more emojis and ‘weird’ subject lines on the re-sends just to see what happens.

The great thing about this strategy is you can implement it RIGHT NOW! In fact, here is my challenge to you:

Go find an email you sent in the past 2-4 weeks and re-send it to the unopens. Right now! Then report the results below in the comments.

Are you re-sending your emails to unopens? What results have you seen?